Okay, a bit of ill-informed armchair analysis here, so get your grains of salt ready:
Strong stock price yes, and high gross profits, but Apple's P/E ratio is worse than many of the others in the upper echelons of profit. Google's is worse still, but there at least is significant diversification in the tech sector making it a safer "disruption-resistant" bet.
And I don't see much room for growth in Apple. Barring surprises, which have been absent in the last few years, Apple has an uphill battle improving its market share globally. Compare this to the emerging nations of the world that decidedly cannot buy new iPhones in quantity, but can buy commodity-priced Android hardware.
There's still a place for "premium" in the mix too: During the rise of Android, Apple & iOS were looked to as best of breed, head & shoulders above the rest. But in the last 2-3 years, while this is still the case, the gap between Apple and flag-ship competitors on the Android side has narrowed significantly. They lag on somethings too, such as late-to-the-game screen size increases where either aesthetics or inertia give them a blind spot. Or maybe its that the Android ecosystem forces a lot more feature variation because there's so many more handset manufacturers. I don't know.
It just seems like Apple is now competing mostly on market-hyping novelty features, and that's a hard game to win in for very long. I'd be very bear-ish on Apple if 1+ years pass without something a bit more wow.
Their business is almost entirely based off of iphones right now. If they focus on improving their desktop and laptop brand, they may be able to get some traction there. Perhaps if they make a lower-end line of computers or phones -- although I doubt they'll do that since they want to be seen as a 'premium' brand. Google isn't really more diverse than apple, something like 90% of their revenue comes from adwords. They keep trying to diversify and make a profit off of other venues, but they keep failing at it.
- 46.7 million iPhones sold, up 2% YOY for revenue
- 10.3 million iPads sold, up 14% YOY for revenue
- 5.4 million Macs sold, up 25% YOY for revenue
- $8.5 billion services revenue, up 34% YOY
- $3.2 billion other products revenue, up 36% YOY
They seem to be doing really well with Macs and iPads sales, as well as extracting more profit out of iPhone users with services like Music. Apple just finds a way to keep growing. I imagine the reinvented Mac desktop machine might help (https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives) and hopefully Watch will eventually get the mythical bloodless glucose reader they've been researching for years.
True I suppose. Apple sells hardware and earns revenue through a platform they created for content. Google sells much less hardware, but made the OS the Platform, app store included, primarily to have control of the ecosystem for ad delivery. The primary difference in terms of security of their revenue streams is that Google doesn't need to sell hardware to secure their stream, while Apple's (apart from itunes for music on a PC) is directly tied to # of hardware units it can push. It's still always jarring when I realize, yet again, "Wait, Google is just an advertising firm. All else follows that."
Well, there's my grains of salt for me then too! At least I'm not getting paid to get this stuff right, I'd hate to be a paid incompetent instead of just a hobbyist at it.
Strong stock price yes, and high gross profits, but Apple's P/E ratio is worse than many of the others in the upper echelons of profit. Google's is worse still, but there at least is significant diversification in the tech sector making it a safer "disruption-resistant" bet.
And I don't see much room for growth in Apple. Barring surprises, which have been absent in the last few years, Apple has an uphill battle improving its market share globally. Compare this to the emerging nations of the world that decidedly cannot buy new iPhones in quantity, but can buy commodity-priced Android hardware.
There's still a place for "premium" in the mix too: During the rise of Android, Apple & iOS were looked to as best of breed, head & shoulders above the rest. But in the last 2-3 years, while this is still the case, the gap between Apple and flag-ship competitors on the Android side has narrowed significantly. They lag on somethings too, such as late-to-the-game screen size increases where either aesthetics or inertia give them a blind spot. Or maybe its that the Android ecosystem forces a lot more feature variation because there's so many more handset manufacturers. I don't know.
It just seems like Apple is now competing mostly on market-hyping novelty features, and that's a hard game to win in for very long. I'd be very bear-ish on Apple if 1+ years pass without something a bit more wow.